Irving vs. Irving: Canada's Feuding Billionaires And The Stories They Won't Tell

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Penguin Canada, Sep 30, 2014 - Biography & Autobiography - 304 pages
They are Canada’s third wealthiest family, the fifth-largest private landowner in the U.S.A. They have a monopoly on New Brunswick’s English-language print media and billions of dollars in offshore accounts.

They are the Irvings. And they have always placed a premium on discretion and family unity. They built their empire —which includes Canada’s largest refinery, soon to be linked by pipeline to Alberta’s oil fields—by remaining private. Irving vs Irving tells the story of how these ambitious, often ruthless entrepreneurs came to dominate the economic and political affairs of Atlantic Canada, and how they learned to love the property that perplexed them most: their media monopoly.

The Irvings’ control of all of New Brunswick’s daily newspapers often allowed the family’s business pursuits to escape journalistic scrutiny. Readers frequently wondered what wasn’t in the newspaper, such as the Irving’s lobbying for their logging interests and the sinking of their tanker loaded with PCBs.

In Irving vs Irving, veteran reporter Jacques Poitras uses the empire’s media holdings to examine previously untold episodes of this family epic from patriarch K.C. Irving’s manipulation of his mother’s affections to a Shakespearean confrontation between generations.

 

Contents

Cast of Characters
The Newspapers
Authors Note
Behave Yourselves
Becoming K C Irving
A Local Oil Company
His Presence Is There
Straight Roads
Out of His System
Stop the Presses
Spicy but Not
Rowing in the Same Direction
Blueberry Muffins
More Trees Are the Answer
Wheels Within Wheels
Dead Tree Edition 15 A Family Activity

Stirring the
Reynolds Refined
Notes
Copyright

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About the author (2014)

JACQUES POITRAS has been the provincial affairs reporter for CBC News in New Brunswick since 2000. He is the author of three previous books: The Right Fight: Bernard Lord and the Conservative Dilemma, Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy, a finalist for the BC National Award for Canadian Non-fiction, and Imaginary Line: Life on an Unfinished Border, which was a finalist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing. Poitras lives in Fredericton.

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